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Why load average is greater than number of cores CPUs? But, htop command is not showing which process are using so much CPU load average.

current load average

htop command

marcelorodrigues
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  • Yes, the load can be larger than your number of CPUs available. And yes, htop DOES show them, see the lower 4 lines in your screenshot. I guess these are sorted by CPU usage. – vautee Jan 26 '22 at 13:33
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    LA is affected by blocking I/O and you have at least two processes with `D` state (blocked on I/O). – AlexD Jan 26 '22 at 14:21
  • Please tag your question with the operating system in question. Load average implementation various between OSes, and performance related tools are very different. – John Mahowald Jan 26 '22 at 21:42

1 Answers1

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Linux load average is a number equal to the number of the running processes plus a number of processes ready to run and waiting for available CPU plus the number of processes in uninterruptible state (usually blocked on disk I/O). See Brendan Gregg article Linux Load Averages for more details.

AlexD
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